Linux.FR has an interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."

But really, when was the last time we have seen any significant progress in the BSDs?

There's lot of progress but mainly not in the end-user desktop space.

I haven't seen something similar in BSDs.

It's called stability and maturity. That said, there's plenty of new stuff with, for example, each new OpenBSD release. Not exciting stuff like "we replaced the init system and now everything is wild, broken and crazy" but I can live without that in my infrastructure.